


this is the essence of love and failure

by procrastinatingbookworm



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Child Death, Chronic Illness, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Rituals, Suicidal Thoughts, as an entity separate from him, dead dove in this case meaning, grimm has a mental health crisis over grimmchild's existence, that he now and forever more will have to kill to prolong his own life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:41:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27362149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procrastinatingbookworm/pseuds/procrastinatingbookworm
Summary: You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together / to make a creature that will do what I say / or love me back.
Relationships: Grimm & Grimmchild (Hollow Knight), Grimm & The Radiance (Hollow Knight)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 40





	this is the essence of love and failure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [feralphoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/gifts).



> this is feral's fault

Grimm is aware that the child is not him.

Ever since Grimm chose to pull his Heart from his chest, he’s felt the space it left behind—the blackened mark carved into him, where the bonfire of the Nightmare Heart once raged—a faint echo of drumbeats just off-tune from the Heart’s beat. It has never left him; it guides his hand as surely as it did when it was part of him, but the absence of it is as keen as a wound.

The child left no such space, when it was made. The ache that blooms in Grimm’s chest like a plucked string at the sight of it is entirely new.

It is  _ his _ , this child, though not in the traditional sense. There were no eggs, no partner. Grimm has no choice in that matter—he has already pushed his body to the limit of the space between mortality and immortality, on the knife edge of a high note. To dilute his creation with more mortal blood would snap the thread between him and his Heart, and there would be no return.

The child is born of flame, as is everything that is Grimm’s. Born tiny and silent and grey, out of the fire and into Grimm’s open palms, ballad-warm. It’s terrifyingly small and still, with eyes tightly shut, and for a moment Grimm is afraid that he has failed.

Then he feels its heart beat under his claws, and the terror grows roots, deep into the cavern of his chest.

The child is not him—he cannot feel it the way he feels his Heart. It is his but not him. His offspring, his progeny, _his_ _child,_ given life by the Heart.

Given a life all its own.

_ This will require sacrifice,  _ his Heart had told him, when he’d raised the knife to his breast and cut in deep, to the flame at the core of him.  _ You will live forever in a place between life and death. _

When Grimm awoke, halved and half-mortal, weak and trembling, throat and tracheae scorched to singing by the flames, he had assumed  _ that _ was the sacrifice. The agony of existence, alongside the delights of it.

But the Heart had spoken literally. For Grimm to live, another life would have to be sacrificed.

The life of this child. This child, and the next, and the next. A life forever built on death.

Grimm wants with all his broken being to  _ scream _ , but there’s a child sleeping in his hands like a muffled chorus.

Their life is forfeit. No. It will be forfeit  _ soon _ . 

Soon, Grimm’s heartless body will start to cave in, and he will gather up his world under his wings, and find the wreckage of a kingdom to leave his unlit fire, singing into the dark, for a survivor to come calling and wake the Grimm Troupe.

He has done this before. Never with such necessity, but Grimm has long since set the Grimmkin dancing in the ashes of what came before.

Now, their flames will feed Grimm’s child—no. Their flames will feed the Heart within the child. Grimm will burn like the rough edges of a folk song, and the child’s stolen life will burn, and the King of Nightmares will live on.

Forever.

*

It is a mistake—no, it is a failing. A mistake implies choice, and Grimm has no choice in the fact that he is failing to uphold his duty to the Heart, to his Troupe, to the Nightmare Realm.

It is a failing, to love the child.

They do not need his love, no matter how small and frail they seem. No matter their quiet mewling as they traverse the Nightmare Realm within their sleeping mind. No matter their heartbeat under Grimm’s claws, faster than Grimm’s own Heart and slightly off-beat from it.

They’re a  _ child _ .

It is a vessel he holds, a promise kept by the Heart, immortality maintained, but there is a child slumbering inside, a child with Grimm’s face in miniature and a heart of their own, and Grimm can do nothing but love them.

It is a failure.

They are small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, and there they stay, a sweet, low tune, as he crafts the charm that will bind them to their summoner.

Their soft grey body is whistle-cool against Grimm’s overheated carapace. To anyone else they would seem feverish, perhaps too hot to touch, but to Grimm, always burning, they are a pleasant chill.

If he sets them on his shoulder, their tiny face in the crook of his neck, the beat of their heart nearly drowns out Grimm’s own.

Nearly.

Nearly, because the child is Grimm’s, but the Heart  _ is _ Grimm, and it will not be ignored.

_ You know better, _ it tells him, when the child makes a tiny mewl of a sound into Grimm’s neck, and Grimm takes them into his palms and cradles the melody of them up against his face.

He does know better. To wind his child into a charm that will sever them from him is more agonizing than the act of cutting out his heart had been, and the more he loves them the worse it will be.

And yet.

And yet, he cradles his ever-sleeping child in hands stained with soul and flame, and considers the merits of his own premature death.

There are none. He knows that. More likely than not, the child would be taken as the Heart’s vessel anyway, no matter how unprepared they were. Gods are persistent that way.

If the child failed to contain the Heart, unfed by flames, they would die alongside their father, and the Nightmare Realm would forever be cut from the waking world.

It would solve nothing.

(It would hurt less than this.)

His child mewls again. He sets them back on his shoulder, into the warmth between his throat and his wings, and they settle.

Grimm cuts grooves into the charm with his claws, carves the markings that he’s given his child to bear into the representation of their face. He stares at the half-made thing. Half a charm, of half a child, of half a god, of half the realm of dreams.

He wonders if this terrible love is what his other half feels for her children.

She has many, though—as many as there are Grimmkin, maybe more. She cannot love all of them the way Grimm loves his only child—it would tear her apart.

It’s tearing  _ him _ apart.

The only comfort is that he will not have to watch the child die. He will already be gone.

(Perhaps the Heart will be merciful enough to not share that memory, when Grimm is born again.)

*

Grimm would say that it doesn’t happen with enough of a warning, but that is provably false. 

The warning is in his every hymn-sharp breath—the rasping wheeze steadily encroaching on him, until his every performance is a battle against himself, a war of persistence.

(Eventually, many lifetimes later, Grimm will surround himself with more than the Grimmkin. Bugs with minds of their own, that are more than fear and flame made to dance. Bugs that will take him aside and tell him in no uncertain terms to  _ stop _ . Eventually. His metaphorical heart is not yet healed enough to love anything with a choice.)

Grimm can feel his body dying. He shakes like a plucked string, weak in every joint from lack of oxygen, breathing in shallow, crackling gasps.

When he sleeps (more and more often, these days), the Heart breaks its silent watch and stands before him, in a guise the same as Grimm’s own shape, though much more vibrant.

“Don’t be a fool,” it says, in the same broken voice as Grimm. It cups his face in psalm-hot hands. “Do you seek punishment? Is that why you prolong this so?”

The Heart presses a kiss to Grimm’s forehead, its breath scalding notes across his face.

“Have you not suffered enough, my soul?” it asks, and Grimm wrenches himself away.

He wakes just in time to see his child’s eyes open, blinking unknowingly at him from their place in his nest.

Grimm’s chest seizes, and for a moment he’s certain that he’s waited too long—that he’s dying here, in his nest, with the Ritual not yet begun, the child not yet fed.

The thought is terrifying, but short-lived. He knows what death feels like, and this is a different kind of pain. This violence of the body against itself is no less visceral, for all that it leaves fewer scars.

Grimm is familiar with grief. He understands, as he must, how it shapes the fears of mortal bugs, how it clings to the mind like dust to wings, perfect kindling for a nightmare even in a bug no longer preoccupied with what they’d lost.

He carries grief of his own, and has since before cutting away his heart. 

His parting with his other half, the Light to his Flame, the Dreams to his Nightmares, had been a mutual, amicable agreement that they needed their own space, their own realms, but Grimm still misses her.

Her, and his Heart, and this child that he’ll never raise, no matter how many lives he lives.

Grimm knows grief. He knows it well. But it has never cut into him so deeply, to the point of burning, harsh as Flame.

His child mewls. Uncertain on their wings, they hop and claw more than they fly as they make their way up their father’s trembling body, to nudge their face into his, chirping inquisitively.

“I’m sorry,” he tells them, voice breaking in his throat. He gathers them up in one palm, holding them to his chest. “I truly am sorry, I swear it.”

He feels feverish, throat seized with pain and chest aching, vision fragmented, as though he’s peering through one of his other half’s crystals.

He’s… crying.

Strange.

It’s so strange that it makes him laugh, strangled and ragged, trailing off into a sobbing, wracking cough that makes his child mewl at him in concern.

It will be easy—all but out of his hands. Yet another Ritual, yet another dance. He will burn and be reborn. 

(And the child will never have a chance to live.)

Grimm settles the child on his shoulder and wraps his arms around his knees, folding his wings over himself, like a frightened grub.

His child’s heart beats a poem against his throat.

“Grimm,” a voice says, louder than the two heartbeats he hears. “Oh, Grimm, what have you done?”

*

Radi makes him tea. It glows slightly, in the mug she hands to him, an only mildly unnatural-looking orange. It tastes like citrus and honey, and it’s warm as a song sung for the living, not the dead.

“You’re a moss-brained idiot, Grimm,” Radi says, as if she hadn’t made her opinion very clear in the fact that she made him tea, without speaking, and completely refusing to look at him.

“Yes, I know.” Grimm rasps, and startles at the sound of his own voice. He sounds more than sickly, more than hoarse. He sounds like something that should be dead.

(Suitable, since it’s true.)

“We’re not meant to change our natures, My Heart,” Radi says, more gently than she’s holding Grimm’s sleeping child against her shoulder. “We already tempt fate enough by existing as two instead of one. And now you’ve made yourself three-fold? Grimm!”

“I know!” Grimm snaps, again, this time with more force than his throat can handle. He doubles over, coughing, and to his horror,  _ can’t stop _ . He chokes and heaves until he’s certain that he’s dying, dragging in air between such violent coughing that he  _ gags— _ and then it ends.

There’s blood on his hands, and on the ground, and spattered into the tea Radi made. It’s on her face, too, and the backs of her hands, which are still clamped over her mouth in shock.

“What justified this?” Radi asks, low-voiced. “What… what made this worthwhile?”

“I…” Grimm wheezes. “I was curious.”

Radi glows, faintly. “You were curious?”

“They aren’t anything like us,” Grimm murmurs, hugging his knees to his chest. “It fascinated me. And honestly, what else was I going to do with eternity? There are only so many nightmares you can drink from the bloated corpses of ruined kingdoms before it gets stale.”

“So you decided to, what? Drink your own nightmares from your own bloated corpse?” Radi asks, and Grimm laughs so hard he starts coughing again.

Radi waits for him to catch his breath, then glares at him until he remembers she asked him a question.

“I didn’t know that this would happen,” Grimm says, staring past Radi at his child on her shoulder. “I thought the sacrifice would be mine alone.”

“It is, in a sense,” Radi says, taking pity on him and wrapping him in her wings, her leaning her head on his shoulder. “The child will have no concept of suffering.”

Grimm sobs. It feels like the sound is torn out of him, through his abused trachea and between his teeth. There should be blood along with it, and not just more useless tears.

“My Heart,” Radi murmurs, running her wingtip up and down Grimm’s trembling wings, in a rhythm that reminds Grimm of a lullaby.

“My Light,” Grimm answers. “Will you help me?”

“You made your nest, Grimm,” Radi replies, her wings like a funeral dirge as she embraces him. “Lie in it.”

She stays with him through the night, but there’s nothing for either of them to say, after that. Nothing he can ask, and nothing she can grant.

The child sleeps on, unknowing.


End file.
